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When I was asked to write about Balochistan, I agreed without thinking. What sort of Pakistani English-language writer would pass up such an opportunity for virtue signalling? Within minutes I had a plan for the 700 words requested. My piece would be about how 785 out of every 100,000 mothers die giving birth in Balochistan compared to 272 in the rest of Pakistan. I was already a couple of hundred words in it when my own baby demanded my attention.

By the time I came back to it, my original idea of mock press releases from the army’s public relations arm and the Prime Minister’s Office celebrating the dead women as martyrs fallen to Indian strains of malnutrition, haemorrhage, anaemia and high blood pressure, seemed equally lifeless. It was doing exactly the same thing I was accusing the military and the government of doing, rendering the dead women invisible by making it all about the men. Into the recycle bin went the draft, even the good lines, like the one about child bearing child and the kind of missing person a dead mother creates.

For my next approach, I tried numbers. This would be a short, staccato construction, bombast punching empiricism along the lines of … “China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has a 46 billion dollar investment. The Balochistan Maternal and Child Health Policy has a 135 million dollar shortfall. Pakistan has raised special units of thousands of men for the corridor-related security.

Sea Pack | Akram Dost Baloch (oil and acrylic on canvas)

Most of the 7,200 regularised Lady Health Visitors in Balochistan refuse to serve in remote areas. Workers will have completed the Gwadar-Khuzdar Road by December 2016. X number of pregnant women will have died on the road to Quetta. Energy projects in Balochistan will be complete in X-Y years. The average Baloch woman has 6-8 children. Correct interpretation of the Quran will be taught to all adolescents in the schools the Chinese are bringing. The average Baloch girl has her first child at 16.”

I was getting into the rhythm of it when my older two sons came home from school. By the time the day with its ahimsa settling of internecine squabbles was done, The Other Famished Road had gone the way of the first draft, decomposing under the hot sun into the meaningless wordplay from which it was constructed, like an Ahsan Iqbal briefing.

Meaninglessness was the heart of it. Was I struggling to give meaning to meaningless death? It was easier with dead men. You could pretend they died for something. Nationhood. God. Money. Dead heroes, dead spies, dead patriots, or dead anti-nationals. The dead women were just dead women. What had they died for? Nobody carried their names on placards outside Pakistani embassies in other countries, or read about them in glossy magazine print. There was a throwaway explanation in one report about the women outside a health clinic. They refused to give their names or speak of what afflicted them. Tribal custom. In another, I read about Bushra, 15, who bled to death.

The purdah of custom covered other details too. In a story by a white man for a famous foreign paper, and a brown man for another, I read about drills and bullets and electrocution and eyes in Balochistan. In smaller stories in local back pages about infant and maternal mortality, there were only statistics and acronyms. In the kingdoms of men there are not enough cents per word for the gore of lady parts. Or paisas.

I was back to where I had started from, the idea of “What if you speak of us as we speak of you?” But those eleven words contained the entire story. There was nothing I could add to it. All I could offer as prologue was simple, direct, speech.

Gala celebrations at Gwadar were televised the other night. There was a pop song about riding waves and there were men wherever you looked. Hamid Mir, who once got shot right after doing a television talk show on Balochistan, was there. Men continued to pat or stab each other on the back for business deals while women and girls continued to die giving birth.

Comments (10) Closed

excellent article..nicely written..lot meaningful..from India...The last line summariseed it all..

Jalbani BalochJan 30, 2017 09:52am

Honestly, I could not make the meaning of her piece of writing, which is completely in disarray and does not convince the ordinary reader.

AngerJan 30, 2017 11:19am

The ending says it all!

RashidJan 30, 2017 01:04pm

Excellent article

Ali BalochJan 30, 2017 01:15pm

Its a "piece of art" - both writing and illustration. God bless you.

yaqut khanJan 30, 2017 06:09pm

narendra modi has accepted that india is involved in terrorism in baluchistan.

whysoJan 30, 2017 09:29pm

@yaqut khan : somebody has to accept the death of the women while giving birth to the child too.
Excellent article!

Subodh JainJan 31, 2017 06:24am

It is a question of priorities. Baloochistan and Sindh are getting short changed in allocation of resources. Mega project make headlines, basic human necessities are ignored. People need roti, kapda aur makan before anything else. Education and civic services come next. An oversized military takes too many resources away from uplifting of the society. Like, the writer implied only Pakistanis can fix them, blaming others won't do it.